For the World’s Fastest Gamers, Failure Is Just One Bad Jump Away

Cosmo Wright performing a run at Awesome Games Done Quick 2012, a seven-day charity event that raised $149,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Courtesy Cosmo Wright

Cosmo Wright knows The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker better than anyone — maybe even the people who made it.

The 23-year-old from Chicago is the world’s fastest player of the GameCube adventure game, which came out in 2003. He’s spent thousands of hours obsessively playing this one game over and over, shaving seconds off his time until he completed it in less than four and a half hours. About a month ago, Wright embarked on a new challenge: The high-definition remake of the game that Nintendo just released on its new Wii U platform. He’s gunning to get the record in that, too, and broadcasting all of his practicing on Twitch, a streaming video website.

On September 22, 6,000 people were watching Wright play.

Link, the protagonist of the Zelda series, is down to his last little bit of health. Wright plants a bomb at his own feet. It’s a seemingly suicidal move: The bomb explodes and Link loses his last bit of health. But it’s not game over, not yet. Instead, Link flies into the sky. Wright pounds on his controller, averaging an insane 13 button inputs per second as Link’s nearly-dead corpus rises off the ground, twitching in the air and emitting a series of truncated, staccato yelps. He floats all the way up to the top of a tower, a tower that Link is not yet meant to access.

Wright is speedrunning the new version of Wind Waker, attempting to exploit every single loophole in the gameplay, including bugs that Nintendo never fixed, in an attempt to finish the adventure in the fastest time possible. Speedrunning is something akin to setting high scores in games that don’t have a scoring system, a way for top-tier players to rank themselves. With a few exceptions, speedrunning is usually not something for which these videogames reward you: You get the same ending in Super Mario 64 whether you finish it in 3 hours or 30 hours. But top speedrunners can become Internet famous, thanks to the popularity of streaming sites like Twitch.

“With a lot of these viewers, they’re pretty much living with these speedrunners,” says Twitch community manager Jared Rea. “It’s very authentic. They’re watching them do it live and they’re watching them physically perform it. They’re watching them face challenges and meet new obstacles and have these really great runs that end in heartbreak.”

Heartbreak about sums it up. For as fast as these players are whipping through the games they have set out to master, speedruns can actually take many hours for each attempt. Wright’s Wind Waker record is 4:27:53. That means speedrunners can play, and the audience can watch, for the better part of an evening only to make one tiny mistake and have to junk the whole thing. The agony of defeat comes much more often than the thrill of victory.

Many speedrun fans remember the time that Mike “Siglemic” Sigler, the record holder for Nintendo’s 1996 game Super Mario 64, was tracking ahead of his own record but blew it by missing an easy jump. It was like watching Tiger Woods whiff a tee shot. 8,000 people watched in horror. “There goes the [world record],” one wrote. “Please kill me,” added another.

“Speedruns are not inherently important by themselves,” says Wright. “They become important when an audience is paying attention and is captivated.”

The practice of recording and posting one’s videogame completion times to the internet has roots that stretch all the way back into the early 1990s with games like Doom and Quake. But Nathan Jahnke, a staff member at Speed Demos Archive, says that speedrunning “was not yet a thing” until about 2003, shortly after the release of Nintendo’s GameCube game Metroid Prime.

Unlike Zelda, the Metroid series actually did reward players for finishing the first-person space adventure more speedily. It inspired a growing group of players, mostly posting on message boards like GameFAQs, to begin capturing and posting videos of their full playthroughs. Back then in the days of dial-up, it could take days to download one of the hours-long video files.

Despite the limitations, the ability to share video footage of runs allowed speedrunners to collaborate and learn from each other.

“People were watching one another’s every move,” says Jahnke, “and the effect was [that] information about time-saving tricks [built] up more and more rapidly.”

Watch: 7 Tricks of the Speedrunning Trade

Wright successfully performs the Zombie Hover glitch in Wind Waker HD, but it doesn't work the way he expected it to in the end.
Video credit: Cosmo Wright

Quake was one of the first games to inspire a serious speedrunning community. Over the years some players have gotten... well... a little too good at the game.
Video credit: Youtube user wusseh

The endless staircases that separate floors of the castle in Mario 64 aren't so endless after all, if you can move quickly enough. Youtuber PsychoSpeedGame has been kind enough to record a tutorial showing anybody how to pull off the Backwards Long Jump glitch.
Video credit: Youtube user PsychoSpeedGame

At the 17:30 mark in this video, we see a complicated glitch that allows players to exit the boundaries of Mirror's Edge's world. By skipping massive level segments, speedrunners of ME are able to beat it in less than 40 minutes.
Video credit: Youtube user VafflaN8

Most people, given unlimited time, would find it pretty difficult to beat Super Meat Boy. This guy does it in less than 20 minutes, and reveals a handful of useful tricks in doing so.
Video credit: Youtube user ExoSDA

This video would be impressive enough if the runner only beat Portal in fewer than 10 minutes, but he also uses a bizarre series of exploits to reach the cake room shown at the end of the game.
Video credit: Youtube user Michael Yanni

Here Cosmo Wright and some fellow speedrunners demonstrate and explain the warp glitch in Ocarina of Time that changed everything.
Video credit: Youtube user SwordlessLink

Soon, the speedrunners found that they’d wrung Metroid Prime dry of secrets — at least, as far as they knew. Hungry for something else, the Metroid players began to branch out to new games. Speed Demos Archive began to accept and post runs for almost any game, quickly becoming the de facto hub of speedrunning leaderboards. Today, speedrunning is so popular that some players like Cosmo Wright can make a decent income off the advertising that runs over their streams.

The most popular speedrunners understand that, if they want to make money, they are first and foremost in the entertainment business.

Daniel “GoronGuy” Sword, a 17-year-old high school student from Stockholm, Sweden, has become the most popular speedrunner of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, even though he isn’t necessarily the best player of the game.

The World’s Fastest GamersThe current world record times for some popular games.

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker — Cosmo Wright (4:27:53)

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD — gymnast86 (4:35:03)

Super Mario 64 (120 stars) — Mike “Siglemic” Sigler (1:48:05)

Portal — Sourceruns Team (0:09:12)

Metroid Prime — Paul “Bartendorsparky” Evans (1:01:00)

Chrono Trigger — Kari “Essentia” Johnson (5:40:00)

Super Mario Bros. — Andrew Gardikis (0:04:58)

When Sword does his runs of the 2000 Nintendo 64 game he jokes around, laughing and replying to things posted in the chat channel by his viewers. Whenever he finds himself with downtime — waiting for the game to catch up to him, basically — Sword entertains his viewers by showboating, performing complicated stunts using master-level glitches and exploits.

Sword estimates that he’s spent over 1,800 hours practicing and attempting speedrun records in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. This is normal for a serious player.

“I’d say it takes about 100 hours to learn a game,” says Wright. “That’s about the point you know if you actually enjoy speedrunning it or not. From there, assuming the game is mildly complex, you could spend thousands of hours both practicing or attempting runs if you really wanted to.”

Because of the high level of precision needed to pull off even basic maneuvers at a speedrun-worthy level, players can spend years improving their top times.

“Getting the ‘perfect run’ is basically an impossibility,” says Wright. “There is always room for improvement. This is where it becomes interesting to see who can hold out and actually improve it, and who gives up.”

Sigler is well-known for spending entire days in front of his Twitch stream, repeatedly trying and re-trying to top his own records in Super Mario 64. Once, after collecting the 90th of the game’s 120 collectible stars, he sighed deeply and declared: “I’ve been playing for seven hours. I haven’t eaten yet today.” (Sigler did not respond to repeated requests from WIRED to participate in this story.)

At this level of play, the act of moving characters around in a game world becomes second nature for speedrunners. At some point, they say, it all becomes instinctual, and they’re no longer actively thinking about the inputs needed to perform basic actions. That’s why speedruns are so fascinating to watch, especially if you’re already familiar with the game.

Super Mario 64 is not a forgiving game, especially by today’s standards. It’s nearly 20 years old. Nintendo’s designers were still coming to grips with how to create a 3-D world and the result is rough around the edges. You have to fight with the virtual camera and strain your wrists on the uncomfortable controller. Some of the levels are deviously designed. And yet Siglemic runs through them like he’s playing hopscotch, stringing together death-defying leaps with perfect timing, one after the other after the other. It’s mesmerizing, like watching a magic show.

Unless speedrunners find a new glitch to exploit in the Wii U version of Wind Waker, crossing the ocean will be a time-consuming activity. Image: Nintendo

When thousands of hours of practice come down to shaving a few seconds, it’s no wonder that speedrunners can get a touch competitive if their thrones are threatened.

Wright briefly lost his Wind Waker title earlier this year when a player going by the handle Demoon9 entered the final showdown with the game’s big bad guy a full two and a half minutes faster than Wright had ever done it. Five thousand people watched Demoon9 as he neared victory, spamming the livestream’s chat window with memes, profanity and full-blown essays expressing their love or hatred for him.

The fight was over only seven seconds after it began. The clock stopped at 4:34:09, and the crowd went wild.

“That was the run,” Demoon9 said, breathing heavily into his headset, exhausted. “That was the damn run.”

Wright has held, and lost, records in plenty of other games: The PC shareware game Commander Keen IV, Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, Konami’s Castlevania for N64. But Wind Waker was different. That was his game. Wright sent Deemon9 a congratulatory message on Twitter, then got to work.

The two spent the next few months taking turns one-upping each other, but eventually Wright established a new record — 4:27:53 — that no one other than Demoon9 has been able to get close to.

Now, with Wind Waker HD finally out in the wild, a new group of speedrunners has emerged, and Wright is nowhere to be found on the leaderboard. Nintendo didn’t just upgrade the visuals when they built the Wii U edition of Wind Waker. It also dug into the code a bit and made several tweaks to the gameplay. And that changes the game for speedrunners.

Taking advantages of glitches and bugs left in a game’s code is an accepted and even encouraged way to beat games quickly and set new records. Sometimes, new glitches are discovered years after old records are set in stone.

Earlier this year, one player discovered an incredibly useful glitch in another popular Zelda game, Ocarina of Time. The glitch allowed players to teleport from a point very close to the beginning of the game, straight to the final battle at the end.

As one writer put it, the glitch “skipped over 12 years of Zelda speedrunning discoveries, a rich tapestry of glitches and exploits destroyed in the single instant of this trick’s discovery.” Suddenly, the vast majority of the little tricks and exploits that speedrunners had painstakingly unearthed to get their Ocarina times down were useless, since that 99 percent of the game could now be skipped.

Wright wants to get the world record on both versions of Wind Waker, and that rests on discovering and memorizing every tiny difference between the two. That’s why there’s a document on his hard drive that lists and details exactly 48 glitches and exploits between the two games, complete with notes that explain how things have changed between the two versions.

“Zombie hovering” — the speedrunner’s term for the bizarre thing that Wright was doing to Link’s corpse — is still in the Wii U version, but it doesn’t seem like it will be as useful. When Wright landed after his ascent, Link died, rendering the whole flight a waste of time. (“They patched it,” he screamed at the camera. “Oh my god, they patched it!”)

Even more useful glitches are gone in the new version. One is called the “Storage Glitch.” If you climbed Link up to a ledge and pulled out his magic wand at the moment that you dropped off the cliff, something weird would go wrong with the game’s collision detection. You’d be able to move around while opening a treasure chest, slip through tiny cracks, walk straight up certain walls or — most usefully — rocket at top speed across the game’s massive open-world ocean.

“Most people wouldn’t be able to tell whether it worked or not, but it lets you do crazy stuff,” Wright says.

Some of the glitches remain. One — named “Cosmohopping,” after Wright, by his fans — lets you leap sideways alongside a tiny ledge to save 20 seconds on a particular puzzle. It’s still in the Wii U version, but Wright is having trouble with the technique he pioneered. He uses the GameCube version’s on-screen interface as a guide to line up his jumps perfectly, but the heads-up display on the widescreen Wii U version is totally different.

Wright isn’t posting times for Wind Waker HD yet. He’s practicing. But he has been keeping tabs on the leaderboards, and admits that he’s a little worried about strong competition from the current record holder, a 15-year-old from Los Angeles who uses the handle gymnast86.

Carl Wernicke is gymnast86’s real name, and he’s one of only 12 people in the world with the ability to beat the original Wind Waker in fewer than five hours. Wernicke says that he’ll hold onto his record in Wind Waker HD for as long as he can, but that marching band practice might get in the way of his training regimen.

Wernicke told WIRED via Skype that he thinks he has some advantages over Wright, but that he knows that Wright “is going to learn Wind Waker HD faster than I will.”

Wright is just as confident that he will take the crown from Wernicke.

“It’s definitely going to happen before the end of this year,” he says. “I’ve just got to practice a little bit.”

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